Posts Tagged ‘VPN’

Public clouds are fantastic for a majority of infrastructure use cases. And interconnectivity between clouds enables myriad solutions to empower businesses to have multiple synchronized points of presence across the world. Companies can easily set up connections that traverse the public Internet as a means to transmit and potentially synchronize data between cloud data centers. But these connections need to be reliable and more often than not, private.

CloudLink private network between cloud data centers

With public network connections between clouds, users are at the mercy of hops and latency. For example, data may take one route with a particular number of hops, and a second later, may follow a completely different path and take a longer or shorter amount of time based on the connection.

In terms of securing the transport, some companies rely on point-to-point VPN connections using a hardware or software solution or some combination of the two. However, these solutions are also constrained by the connection and have limited speeds.

There are some scenarios or use cases that warrant using dedicated private networking to join geographically dispersed clouds. This is where GoGrid’s CloudLink service comes into play.

GoGrid’s CloudLink is a data center interconnect product—a redundant 10 Gbps pipe that is isolated to GoGrid traffic only. CloudLink enables private network traffic between different servers in GoGrid’s US data centers. As part of our “Complex Infrastructure Made Easy” mission, we designed this service to be basic yet powerful and still meet the needs of demanding organizations. Because this is a private network, much like the private network within GoGrid’s standard cloud infrastructure, there are no bandwidth costs. You simply decide on the connection speed (10 Mbps, 100 Mbps, or 1 Gbps), configure your connection, and pay for just the dedicated connection. (more…) «The Top 3 Private Networking Use Cases for CloudLink»

At GoGrid, we are often asked to provide solutions for a variety of use cases. More often than not, businesses are not looking for “standard” cloud implementations. And what really is “standard?” When you think about it, every business has unique needs in order to satisfy their cloud challenges. We help companies craft these solutions daily and we call it Creating a Cloud Fingerprint. But, as is the nature of cloud computing, many users desire to figure it out themselves, simply because solutions can be architected fairly easily, and if it isn’t quite right, they can be modified.

In our regular discussions with companies looking for information on how they can benefit from cloud Infrastructure as a Service, we often come across the same set of hurdles, namely:

Most established companies have an existing infrastructure investment, and may not be willing or able to sacrifice these investments,

Some infrastructure components may not be generally available through IaaS vendors, such as Enterprise security or storage infrastructure,

Some applications or data will be deemed “too sensitive” for the cloud due to internal objections or compliance constraints,

Maintaining and growing an on-premise solution or even data center is not only difficult, but extremely expensive,

Doing a full migration to the cloud comes with a very high conversion and operational cost,

Business simply are unsure as to how to best leverage cloud computing.

With these challenges in mind, we have a solution that allows business not only to utilize their existing infrastructure, but also leverage GoGrid’s public cloud to create a Virtual Private Cloud on GoGrid.

But, addressing the points above is critical in the solution. Therefore, we wanted to be sure:

If you’re brand new to this series, let me catch you up to speed. At the beginning of the year, GoGrid gathered feedback from over 500 CTOs, developers and IT professionals relating to cloud computing and best practices. This week, we’re highlighting the results from the question “What type of security/compliance do you require in the cloud?”

You may have noticed, whenever there is a conversation about Infrastructure-as-a-Service, the security debate is sure to follow. We wanted to see what types of security the IT industry uses and which were the most important to maintaining compliance.

What Type of Security/Compliance Do You Require in the Cloud?

As seen in the chart above, private VLANs, network layer firewalls and DDoS mitigation are the most required form of security according to our respondents, followed closely by Virtual Private Networks.

Having a secure Cloud Computing environment is paramount to GoGrid cloud customers. In fact, many critics of cloud computing in general point to “security” as one of the primary barriers to entry for their company or clients jumping into the cloud as a critical component of a company’s core IT strategy. We whole-heartedly agree that Security in the Cloud should be on any checklist when evaluating cloud providers. To that end, we have enhanced our Hardware Firewall service to ensure that your servers and critical data remain secure from malicious threats that ANY server or website is vulnerable to, cloud or not.

Set up, managed and maintained by experienced GoGrid System Administrators, the new GoGrid Fortinet is designed to insulate your infrastructure on GoGrid from a variety of new and sophisticated threats. Also, if you are working down the path of achieving PCI compliance for your environment running on GoGrid, this hardware firewall solution provides another “check in the box” towards compliance. While host-based firewall solutions do work in many cases, to achieve true protection against attacks, a hardware-based firewall is definitely the direction to go.

On Friday, February 26, one of our GoGrid Partners, ANX eBusiness will be hosting a webinar titled “Disaster Recovery in the Cloud“.

The description of the Webinar is as follows:

With the increasing importance of information technology for the continuation of business critical functions, combined with a transition to an around-the-clock economy, the importance of protecting an organization’s data and IT infrastructure in the event of a disruptive situation has become an increasing and more visible business priority in recent years. It is estimated that most large companies spend between 2% and 4% of their IT budget on disaster recovery planning. Recent technological advancements, primarily with cloud computing, allow more companies to afford and be better prepared for the day disaster strikes. This webinar demonstrates new approaches for implementing a powerful yet cost effective disaster recovery program in the cloud.